


We, the Living

by ahala



Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: (but not an eating disorder), Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Disordered Eating, Established Relationship, M/M, Medical Lab Tech!Antony, Stoic Philosophy, pathologist!brutus, single parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25855816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahala/pseuds/ahala
Summary: Mark Antony tries to get his favorite pathologist to relax after a long day at work. Unfortunately, Brutus has no chill.
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	We, the Living

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is based on how (some) American hospitals work. There are a few inaccuracies because I tried to make it Ancient-Rome-turned-modern themed, but most of it is fairly true to life, and some of my own experiences are peppered in.
> 
> Also, a quick warning: human remains, death, food & disordered eating habits, and drug use are all discussed at varying lengths in this fic. None of them are what I would consider graphic, but they are talked about, just to give you a fair warning.
> 
> Also also, thank you to my beta! You're the enemy to my state.

The rumbling symphony of carts rolling up and down the hall, rubber shoes squeaking on the tile, chatter, and phone calls and pagers and elevators and announcements all melted into a jumble of dull noise that simmered in Antony’s head. He yawned into his armpit as he peeled his gloves off and washed his hands vigorously. His back ached from sitting, and his feet ached from walking all around and collecting specimens from the poor souls on his itinerary. Most of them were swabs with the usual late-autumn harvest of influenza, streptococcal pharyngitis, and bronchitis, although he had a couple of blood tests, urine tests, and the list got worse from there.

His lunch break had been commandeered by the school nurse from the elementary school in midtown reporting that Iullus Antonius was in her office complaining of a headache and sore throat, and if Antony wanted to come to pick him up early from school. Phone calls from the school detailing all sorts of maladies lamented by Iullus had been coming in somewhat frequently, maybe once every two weeks or so. As sickly as he made himself out to be, in the end, the youngest never had a fever, and his symptoms always seemed to clear up by the time they were riding the red line home together. Although he was a little bit more eager to trust his son’s complaints given his day of positive tests for sniffles, he once again told the nurse to give Iullus some tender loving care and then send him back to class. 

He dried his hands, stretched his back, winked at himself in the mirror. It was difficult to be too tired and too irritated even in the face of what might be considered a bad day. Antony was hopeful as he emptied his locker and put his jacket on. There was a quickness to his step as he wove in between traffic to get to the elevator. He didn’t even notice the strange looks as he pushed the button to go down to the hospital basement. 

There wasn’t much there for him. The first time he had ventured there was on accident, a cruel trick played on him on his first day of work, leading him through the morgue. Though, not the kind and supportive side of the morgue, but the part of the morgue with murder victims and strong smells and metal sinks and green tile with a drain, and a specter of a pathologist who bumped into Antony that day. He was an old friend from college, one of Antony’s few nice memories of the time. There was something surprising about seeing a pre-med student actually make it through the grueling track to becoming a doctor when Antony could barely handle a year of general education classes before he dropped out and subsequently shipped off. It had been good to see that some things didn’t change, an old flame among them.

The familiar path through the hallway of offices was lit with buzzing ceiling lights, some flickering slightly under the strain of the lengthening hours in the last day of the workweek. Antony reached office 215A, the door decorated with paper skeletons, pictures of Stoic philosophers, and fruit label stickers, and saw a glow of light under the door spilling out into the hallway. He listened closely and heard some shuffling from within. The clatter of pens in a cup, the creak of a desk chair, clicks and clacks of a computer keyboard. Antony knocked and waited for the mumbled greeting to come in.

“Hi sunshine,” said Antony, taking a seat at Brutus’s desk. Brutus looked up at him, the dark circles under his eyes even more severe as the lengthening night and cloudy days made his skin sallow.

His office was far from sparse, which had taken Antony by surprise the first time he paid him a visit. There was something about Brutus and his presentation that suggested he was a minimalist, his Stoic inclinations keeping him free from material fetters, but underneath all of that exterior, he was a great lover of... _ things _ . There were two great metal bookcases nailed to the wall, and both were overflowing with old textbooks and reference guides, both relevant and irrelevant to pathology. His framed degrees were all piled in a cardboard box on the floor with a spider plant bursting out of its pot on top of them. The hutch above part of his L-shaped desk was spilling with old files and mandatory work handouts haphazardly stuffed up there. An ungroomed bonsai tree sat on top of his miniature refrigerator. An ivy plant hung in front of the window, its vines hanging just above a stone altar dedicated to the Di Inferi. A little gallon fish tank containing only aquatic plants hummed on his desk next to a framed picture of his cat, a little tortoiseshell scrap dotingly named Novacula. Next to her was a specimen jar filled with some sort of preserving fluid that held a small, red piece of inflamed tissue no longer than Antony’s finger (The mystery had only been solved when a night spent at Brutus’s house exposed a puckered scar on the lower right side of his abdomen). 

“Yes, Antony?” 

“How much longer are you planning on staying tonight?”

“I don’t know, just until I’m satisfied with what I’ve gotten done.”

He rolled his eyes and hopped out of the chair to go paw through Brutus’s miniature refrigerator. “That could be  _ days _ . Can I convince you to leave right now?” He found the plastic container with the leftovers from Brutus’s lunch. Antony took the cover off and inspected it. There was a fillet of salmon covered in some sort of sauce with mushrooms and some noodles on the side with florets of broccoli. 

Brutus watched him, tapping his pen on the paper desk planner. “Try me.”

“Alright,” Antony said, picking up the salmon with his fingers and dragging it through the mushroom sauce before taking a bite. “You, me, drinks at The Supernova, poppers in the bathroom-”

“Wait, wait, what about your children?”

“Called a sitter.” Antony grabbed at the thin angel hair noodles and took too large of a bite. “Is that a yes, then?” He asked, his mouth full.

“Do you  _ really  _ think that I would be fun at a club?” Brutus deadpanned.

“Sure, once you’ve had a few drinks in you and you loosened up, got a little sloshed. You’ll be a natural.”

“That’s not really what I meant by that question. Let me be clear: no, thank you.”

“Just the poppers?”

“ _ No _ .”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Antony said, exasperated.

Brutus glared at him. “ _ You _ came to  _ my  _ office, remember?”

“Okay, fine.” Antony pondered the taste of the mushrooms and the lemony salmon, sucking his fingers clean as he thought. “I have a different idea.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a surprise. Finish up what you’re doing and get your things and we’ll go.”

“You’re lying. You’re just going to take me clubbing.”

The wary look on Brutus’s face was enough to draw a snicker from Antony, a burst of laughter that surely did not help his case of convincing Brutus of his trustworthiness. “I’m not! We’re going to have a boring, sober time, just like you like it. I swear to you on my honor.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Come on, hurry up.” 

Brutus’s gaze lingered on him for a cold, threatening moment before he turned to his computer and the screen darkened to black. He stood and grabbed his leather satchel, stuffing papers into it and resting it on his shoulder. “I have to go down to the morgue; I left my sweater.” Brutus brushed past Antony, opening the door and flicking the lights out. Antony looked at him. “ _ Well? _ ”

“I have to come with you?”

“Yes, Antony.” Antony balked before he followed him out, watching Brutus lock the office door behind them. 

The private entrance to the morgue was just beyond a set of two large double doors that separated the ten or so offices from the main floor of the morgue. The lights were even brighter. Gurneys were left in the wide hallway, which was decorated with soft, muted colors and proffered pamphlets on funeral rites and grief counseling in clear racks. It was quiet, peaceful. It was always quiet, and always peaceful. So different from Antony’s unit, and the med-surg units he frequented, where there was always movement, always bustle. His former military career set him up to thrive in such environments, but he could never see Brutus flourishing there. He let it slip when he was half-drunk and well-fucked that he once was a trauma surgery resident. That confession made it easy to see how Brutus would be repulsed by the emergency room and drawn to the pensive world of forensic pathology, with his philosophical proverbs, and his disdain for living company, and his knit sweaters, and his intense eyes, and his bony wrists, and his idealistic heart, and his walls around it, and his frowning lips that Antony would make a fool of himself just to see bloom into a smile. He would give anything to see them grin, to hear him laugh. His dignity? Sure. His well being? Absolutely. His lungs? Liver? He’ll sign them away, and offer his heart to go with it as well, free of charge.

Antony reached down and took Brutus’s hand in his and began to lace their fingers together. He felt Brutus startle. His thin fingers went very stiff for a moment before they relaxed, shifted, fitting his bony knuckles between Antony’s callouses comfortably. Brutus’s hands were like handfuls of snow, freezing between Antony’s warm paws. He moved his thumb over them to get the blood flowing again.

“Why are your hands so cold? Is your thyroid okay?”

Brutus’s lips twitched (though Antony couldn't tell if they twitched up or down) and he wrenched his hand away to scan his ID. The automatic double doors to the cold room slid open.

Antony lingered before the rows and columns of drawers lined up like filing cabinet doors while Brutus went down to a little table at the end of the hall and took the thick sweater resting on the back of a chair. 

“What were you doing in the cooler? I didn’t think you usually spent much time here.”

“Some medical students sat in on an autopsy and asked for a tour afterward.”

He nodded contemplatively. “Are there bodies in here?”

“Bodies, body parts, bones. Any sort of human remains.”

Antony looked closer at the stores, reading the labels attached to each column, designating religion and status, whether the corpses and body parts were claimed or not. “You categorize them by religion?”

“In case they go unclaimed and the state conducts the burial. And also so the medical staff doesn’t do anything we aren’t supposed to, per their beliefs.”

“Or what? Mors will come and sue you for an obol?”

“Don’t be so impious.”

Antony laughed.

“This really is nothing to joke about.”

“Come on, Brutus, let’s go.”

“If you were careful, you'd be more respectful,” Brutus said as he left the cold room and started down the hall with Antony in tow behind him, “or that will come back to you someday.”

Antony scoffed, grinning. “When I’m dead, I’ll get even less respect than some med student stealing a coin out of my mouth.”

“ _ Good _ . That’s what you deserve.”

It was raining by the time they arrived at Antony’s surprise, which was a little Persian restaurant outside of town in a half-abandoned strip mall, accompanied only by a thrift store, a military surplus, and a stall for a large, monthly bazaar. Brutus seemed a little wary as he got out of his car while Antony insisted that such a run-down appearance was the mark of good food (“It means that their food outshines all the cheap decor!”). Brutus, the taller of them, held his black umbrella as they splashed across the parking lot.

It was a wonder that the restaurant was still open, given the late hour of the night. The dining room was nearly empty, with only a few suspicious-looking characters and students from the university scattered around. There was little to look at, save the large fish tank in the lobby, and the tiffany lights hanging above each booth, which sported cracks in the vinyl like root systems spread through the restaurant, across the stained red tile. A little fountain with a white crust making the spout slow to a dribble was in the center of the restaurant, with a small statue of Ahura Mazda grasping arms with Jupiter at the very top. The lights were dimmed, surely to hide all those unsavory blemishes, all of which Antony hailed as the mark of a great restaurant. Large murals graced the walls, all paintings of religious figures and old heroes, some of which Brutus recognized from the Roman canon. One small painting that spanned a particularly dark corner was a gauche representation of Xerxes razing Athens. Brutus rolled his eyes in disgust, and Antony commended the artist for their massive balls.

They were seated immediately, and their food made even quicker, with the slow business at such a late hour. Brutus, who ordered a little plate of baklava quickly started to eye Antony’s dolmeh and plate of zereshk polo ba morgh, and his strawberry lemonade, too. Antony had planned well. The most he had ever seen Brutus eat was a handful of nuts, or a bag of granola, or a piece of jerky he scavenged off of Antony. He didn’t think that Brutus necessarily noticed his poor eating habits, but that didn’t put Antony at ease. If anything, it made him even more eager to deceive Brutus’s miserable diet by targeting his very Roman desire to subjugate everything. On the few times that they had eaten a meal together, the narrative always played out the same: Antony had a hefty meal, and Brutus modestly ordered a side or dessert. But when the food was out, Brutus’s eyes started to wander. That wasn’t to say to that Antony minded. Given what Brutus would eat left to his own volition, he was glad to offer something a bit more substantial.

“That smells really good,” Brutus said, and Antony knew his victory was secured. Within minutes, as Antony talked about a fight his eldest son got in at school, Brutus had annexed a good half of the zereshk polo with vigor, not even pausing to put his hands down between bites. It was all Antony could do to not get distracted from his tales of primary school bullies and the valiance of his child by the wonder that overcame him as he watched that slight man gorge himself. Where did he put all that food?

Eventually the conversation died off, Brutus seeming too preoccupied to hear about stories, and Antony too disinterested in telling them. They deteriorated into a half-comfortable semi-silence filled only with the sound of two line cooks arguing, a busboy making plates clatter in a plastic bin, the low hum and babble of the fish tank, and a siren wailing by outside. But between them, there was nothing. A silence observed by Antony and overlooked by Brutus. 

A silence that eventually became too heavy for Antony to manage. He reorganized the white bowl of sweetener packets. He shook up the little glass bottle filled with peppercorns. He made mini whirlpools in a glass of water with his knife.

“Let me ask you a question,” prompted Antony as Brutus took a break from eating to gulp down strawberry lemonade. 

“About what?” 

“You.”

Brutus scoffed and reached for another grape leaf. Antony grabbed the rim of the plate before he could grab one and he pulled it hard towards himself and out of Brutus’s reach. “It’s just one question. And then you can have these back.”

His eyes narrowed dangerously, but he reluctantly conceded anyway, for the sake of the dolmeh.

“What made you leave surgery? I know you wanted to be a trauma surgeon. Why didn’t you stick with it?”

It seemed, for a moment, that Brutus wanted to ask Antony how he knew that, and Antony was eager to tell him, but that moment faded. Maybe he remembered that night, or maybe he didn’t and simply knew that sating Antony was the quickest way to get his food back. He took another sip of his lemonade and spoke. “I was on a med-surg unit one time when I was a resident, shadowing doctors who were checking up on their patients after their procedures, and, as I walked down the hallway with rooms on each side, I noticed a man in bed, resting. He was very old and suffering from dementia, and I learned from a nurse that he had stopped eating and stopped drinking and was now unresponsive, and had been for a few days. They were arranging to send him to hospice to die there, but he wasn’t to be transported yet. They had him in his room, alone. He had no family to sit by his side. No nurse or doctor thought he was worth ordering a one-to-one to sit by him, as there were living patients that warranted more attention. So, he laid there, dying, alone. It disturbed me for a very long time, and angered me, too. People die in undesirable circumstances all the time, I understand that. My own father was murdered and his corpse was brutalized. But to think of someone nestled in the breast of healthcare and still neglected and abandoned to die in such dismal circumstances is disrespect greater than I can fathom. 

“As I thought about that, I found that caring for the dead was more important to me than saving the living; there are more than enough doctors who want to be the hero. That isn’t to say that I want people to die, but the process of death to burial is one so often overlooked and undermined for the sake of the living, and that does a disservice to the memory of the dead. To me, death demands dignity. Dignity  _ is _ death. And when we, the living, understand that, only then can we transcend from places of fear and regret to places of reverence, and then understanding.” He reached for the plate and started on his next grape leaf.

It couldn't leave his mind as he drove home, displacing the sheer joy at being able to drive Brutus’s car. Of course the Stoic would have a reverence for the state of death and dying, as it was both the ultimate method of surrender in the face of change, but also the greatest act of control and self-preservation. Antony did not care to think about it more than he had to, but the idea of self-preservation as self-immolation was thrilling. Perhaps even more so than his own philosophy, which was to live life as lively as he could, so that he would never forget the gift of his mortality, no matter how dire the lessons.

Surely, that very philosophical carelessness was why he was driving the speed limit, sober and alert, while Brutus was in the passenger’s seat and slumped against the door, dozing. A rowdy lifestyle was why he spent the night having a modest dinner with a modest man who ate all his food without penalty. His devil-may-care attitude was exactly why he threw the pack of cigarettes that he found in Brutus’s glovebox away. But no, it was not his desire for danger that stoked his philosophy then, for what better way is there to celebrate mortality than to love with reckless abandon, believing that the desire would never be reflected back unto him? If Antony wished to feel mortal always, then he did so by submerging himself into constant pain.

Brutus’s house was not difficult to find, tucked in a shroud of woodland atop a hill that overlooked the most urban areas of the city. It was among a collective of summer homes, all spread out through the woods, and vacated due to the lateness of the year. Brutus once told him that his house had belonged to a family friend who he visited often as a youth in June and July. It came into his possession after the friend had packed up his things and relocated permanently to Athens, leaving the summer home for Brutus as a gift when he donned the toga virilis. 

The house was two or so stories, made of wood and brick with large windows adorned with hanging planters filled with ferns. A large chain of ivy was growing up the side of the house, hanging to the north-facing wall. The yard was blanketed with fallen leaves from the large oak tree, and the cypresses were bound with white fairy lights. A rotting pumpkin sat on the porch, the face carved in it sagging and puffy like an old man without his dentures in. 

Antony tugged Brutus out of the car, threatening to move the umbrella away and let him get soaked to the skin by the fat droplets of cold water that was now beginning to freeze. Bleary-eyed and clutching his bag, Brutus complied and unlocked the front door with a yawn, slumping up the stairs with Antony at his heels, leading him to the first room on the right-hand side.

Antony sat in the upholstered armchair in the corner of Brutus’s bedroom while Brutus shuffled around in his house shoes, shoulders hunched. His bedroom was nothing like his office. It was orderly and plain, utilitarian with a blatant air of wealth. It was funny to think that Antony had once found it cold and impersonal, with the muted earth tone theme of beige and brown and olive green everything, from the houseplants, to the furniture, to the rug, to the bedsheets. It had once seemed so generic to him, and annoyingly minimalist. Some backwards, gauche statement of wealth to have little despite having so much. It was the price of neatness. And in some ways, the decor did not get much deeper than that, but at the same time, he could tell it provided a level of calm for Brutus, who worked like he ate: in obscenely large portions, and all at once.

He grew drowsy sitting in that chair and listening to the sound of clothes dropping in the bathroom, the bath faucet running, the splash of shallow water being tossed around like a birdbath. His hands were resting on his stomach, his legs spread out, his heart rate steadying as he flourished in the sound of domesticity. Antony caught a glimpse of Brutus in the mirror as he dried himself off with a red towel. The shirt he pulled on was one of Antony’s, an old drill shirt from when he was in the service. The memories tied to it were too bitter to keep, but to see it on Brutus was like seeing wildflowers sprout up from asphalt cracks, pleasant and a bit exciting in a way. The shirt was too big on him and revealed fading bruises on his collarbone, clashing with the red, peeling wording across the chest.

Brutus trudged into the bedroom, switching off the light behind him and letting darkness swallow them. The bed creaked, the bedsheets murmured, and Brutus sighed. Antony pushed himself out of the armchair and went to go sit on the side of the bed. He pulled the covers up so that they were even along Brutus’s angular shoulders. His hand lingered and a cold hand enveloped his, giving it a squeeze before it slipped under the covers, seeming to beckon Antony in.

“Stay,” Brutus mumbled. The word was whispered so quietly, Antony might have mistaken it for the tendrils of the willow tree outside brushing against the window. “Please.”

“I can’t, Marcus. My boys are waiting for me at home.” His fingers tangled as best they could in Brutus’s short hair, stroking his head and tugging lightly at his soft, chestnut hair.

A strange look flitted across Brutus’s eyes, a blinding strike of clarity in the fog of his exhaustion. It only lasted for a breath before it was gone, and his gaze was matte in the darkness of his bedroom. His eyes closed then, and his lips parted as Antony kept stroking his hair. “Do you work tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “Do you?”

Brutus nodded. Antony expected him to, and it still took him by surprise. “How many hours is that?”

“I don’t know,” he stared off, thinking. Whatever numbers he was coming up with, they were too drastic for him to say, and so he kept his mouth shut. It was easy for Antony to tell. “It’s been busy. Med students, autopsies, testimonies,” he slurred.

“That’s not healthy.”

“I don’t care.”

“Why not?”

“Stay,” he mumbled again, “and I’ll tell you all my secrets.”

“Call off of work tomorrow, and I’ll listen.”

Brutus looked at him again with something Antony read easily as irritation and ire, even with it muddled by the dark and Brutus’s exhaustion. He turned away from him so Antony could no longer see his face, and his hand slipped out of Brutus’s hair and slid to the pillow. 

“Alright,” said Antony. “Okay.” He leaned down and kissed Brutus’s temple. Just the small peck, breathing in the faint smells of formaldehyde and shampoo, had Antony feeling like the doomed men on Ulysses’ ship, ready to dive into the ocean with the sirens. Antony could drown in those bedsheets. He wanted to, knowing that Brutus would care for his body after he had taken his last breath. He would slice down Antony’s breast and his stomach, saw open his ribs, remove his organs one by one. He would inspect each part to see if it was betrayal by his liver or the poppy seeds in his lungs that killed him, just to find his heart shattered in a million pieces. 

He stood up from Brutus’s bed and walked to the door, the old wooden floor creaking quietly. “I’ll see you when I see you.” Antony didn’t wait for a reply. He didn’t really expect one. He shut the door behind him and walked down the groaning steps that seemed to gripe at him to go back up to Brutus’s room. 

It was a path they always seemed to go down again and again. The push and pull between what was right and what was comfortable. One turn, it was Antony trying to force Brutus to put down the whip he was so content to beat himself with. The next turn, it was Brutus shielding Antony’s children’s eyes to keep them from seeing their disappointment of a father. 

He opened the door, and a gust of cold wind stung his face. Distantly, he thought of Brutus’s hands on his cheeks. Antony groaned and sat on the porch, snowflakes melting on the tips of his shoes. He called a taxi. The line rang, and the woman on the other end of the line was chewing her gum audibly. Antony couldn't manage to come up with the address, looking back at the house for at least an address number, and coming up with nothing. He hung up and looked out at the woods. The tall pine trees swayed noncommittally. They didn’t seem to have any attention to give his dilemma as they held on under the ministrations of a thickening snowfall, leaving him to sit there on the porch. The wind was beginning to howl freely, snow creating thick drifts that climbed the wooden stairs. The rotting pumpkin gaped at the sight. The vines of ivy were lulled into a brittle, brown sleep. The pine trees whistled from the very tops of their angular peaks. But, for a moment, they all yielded in silence to the sound of the front door as it opened again and then closed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
